In the text that by 1534 had become the standard school grammar in most English schools, Dean John Colet gives the most concise version of this new pedagogical platform: “[L]atyn speche was before the rules, not the rules before the latyn speche. Besy imitacyon with tongue and penne, more auayleth shortly to get the true eloquent speche, than all the tradicions, rules, and precepts of maysters.”7 Usually described as the product of a “war between grammarians” and strongly associated with the Magdalen School (whose members “monopolized the production of textbooks for school use” throughout England), as well as with Colet and the St. Paul’s School (whose statutes were widely emulated in provincial schools), humanism’s emergent program for teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric reformed the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century education.8 As we know well, this new approach to Latin pedagogy changed the course of English literary history. But in addition it meant that as drilling in imitatio began to alter literary taste and technique, it began to govern pedagogical and interpersonal relationships.9
Throughout Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, I compare school training to literary invention, institutional practice to theatrical performance, in order to explore the kind of impact the classical rhetorical tradition had on character and emotion in the sixteenth century. Famous and lesser-known records from the schools themselves appear alongside an array of Shakespearean characters and emotions that either directly allude to, or more generally draw upon, various forms of grammar school training in Latin eloquence. The argument proceeds dialectically: I read literary texts in light of common school books, procedures, and exercises; and I reinterpret those texts and procedures in light of the poetry and drama its former students went on to compose. Such a method reveals a crucial, yet unpredictable, connection between humanist rhetorical training and early modern experiences of subjectivity, sexuality, gender, and the inner life of personal feeling. When I first began to work this way, asking what we could tell about early Latin training from the poems and exercises boys read and wrote at school, as well as the vernacular poetry and drama written later in life by former students, I realized that the grammar school’s impact on sexuality, affect, and gender was far more ambivalent and contradictory than schoolmasters asserted—or than we, in turn, have yet acknowledged. Indeed, I demonstrate that when read alongside a variety of school materials, the poetic and dramatic production of at least one former schoolboy reveals considerable resistance to the school’s regime precisely when most profiting from its training. There are times when questions of genre and larger trends in literary production (particularly epyllia in the 1590s) require me to examine Shakespeare’s texts in relation to those of other contemporary authors. But Shakespeare’s work remains my primary focus for two reasons: It constitutes one of the largest bodies of evidence by a former grammar schoolboy about rhetoric and the passions; and Shakespeare is one of the few among the era’s most successful and prolific writers whose formal education did not extend beyond grammar school. There is not room enough in one study to examine university practices as well, a job I leave to others.
A famous passage from Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster will help ground the following discussion. Bristling with associations between school training, hierarchy, and classical imitatio, the passage sketches Ascham’s ideal version of how a master should teach grammar and translation. With respect to grammar, Ascham writes that a master must “construe” Latin “into Englishe,” for his student so often that “the childe may easilie carie awaie the vnderstanding of it.” He must then “parse” the Latin “ouer perfitlie.” More important, the “childe” is to follow his teacher’s footsteps exactly: first construe, then parse (“[L]et the childe, by and by, both construe and parse it ouer againe”). Even the act of rote memory at the basis of a grammar lesson requires a relationship of imitation, both textual and personal. The next step—often quoted with respect to “double translation” and the purported humanist preference for gentleness over corporal punishment—also turns on imitation. But now a third party is involved in the transaction. The “childe” is to translate into English from Latin; an hour later, he translates back into Latin; after that, his master points out how far his words deviate from what “Tullie” would have said:
the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him: N. Tullie would have vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would have placed this word here, not there: would haue vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender: he would have vsed this moode, this tense, this simple, rather than this compound …
The scene connects master and student via the student’s likeness to Tullie and his particular habits of speech. The preeminent personification of a rhetorical master in many texts written in, for, and about the school, Cicero triangulates the pedagogical encounter through Rome as Ascham’s final authority for a boy’s edification. His recommended technique for good language teaching moves literally and imaginatively between text and persons—or rather, to anticipate the theatrical aspect of this argument, personae. It gives the student a precise role in a complex social relation of performance, judgment, and address founded on acknowledging hierarchy and honoring the authority of historical precedent. In a popular dictionary, An English Expositor (1616), we get a concise indication of how easily imitation’s formal and social senses might collide:
Imitate. To follow.
Imitation. A following.
Imitator. A follower of another.10
In Ascham’s ideal humanist lesson, a student follows first his schoolmaster and then a personified classical authority. In the process, the “childe” imbibes the art of mimicry in a way that turns on both a real and an imaginary social hierarchy.11 He earns his master’s approval by perpetuating the confusion between text and human, past and present, the linguistic and the personal—a hierarchy and a confusion that become the royal road to learning proper Latin grammar and, eventually, rhetorical eloquence. We will see this confusion again—in more advanced lessons in oratory but also in Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic poetry.
The influential humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives claimed that Latin training would turn a “beast” into a “man.” And in the view of virtually every humanist educational theorist who commented on the matter, instruction in classical grammar and rhetoric would substantively benefit the English commonwealth.12 In the 1940s and 1950s, critics like T. W. Baldwin, Donald Clark, and R. R. Bolgar demonstrated this educational program’s profound impact on England’s literary Renaissance.13 In the 1970s, Joel Altman and Emrys Jones expanded this work by drawing attention to important habits of mind—particularly the school’s fondness for arguments “on either side of the question” (in utramque partem)—that shaped Tudor writing in general and Shakespearean drama in particular.14 In the last twenty years, however, historians and literary critics have turned their attention to the school’s active participation in the ongoing process of social reproduction.15 This book is deeply indebted to both critical approaches. But I expand the first by taking archival evidence about the school’s material practices into account when analyzing subsequent literary history; by pressing further the theoretical as well as the practical alliance between rhetoric and drama in the eyes of schoolmasters; and by specifying a few pervasive, classically derived tropes that, much like imitatio, produced long-standing literary as well as social and personal effects. And I expand the second critical approach—humanism’s intervention in social reproduction—by bringing psychoanalytic questions about subjectivity, language, gender, and sexuality to bear on the texts its schoolboy subjects produced. In other words, by taking the schoolmasters’ emphasis on Latin grammar and rhetoric literally and seriously, I explore the significant overlap between literary history and the widespread institutional effort to teach Latin as a means to uphold—indeed, inculcate—the categories most important to the period’s explicit formulations about a properly functioning social order. These readings therefore put considerable interrogative pressure on the normative distinctions between genders, erotic practices, and social classes that authors in the period presume when representing to themselves, and to each other, what counts as a functioning, healthy “body politic.”
